the first day of the rest of your life (le premier jour du reste de ta vie) 2008 french bcbc

the first day of the rest of your life (le premier jour du reste de ta vie) 2008 region free dvd5 french bcbc



The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (French: Le Premier Jour du reste de ta vie) is a 2008 French film written and directed by Rémi Bezançon. The film received 9 César Award nominations, winning three (Best Editing, Most Promising Actor and Most Promising Actress).

Contains movie and Optional English Subtitles. No menus or extras. Regular DVD quality (Not Blu-ray etc...). Region free files sized for dvd5. Thanks, enjoy.















Synopsis

Five random days in the lives of a French family, spread out over a dozen years, paint a telling picture of the ups and downs of human relationships in this comedy-drama from France. Robert Duval (Jacques Gamblin) is a taxi driver who is married to Marie-Jeanne (Zabou Breitman), who has shed the bohemian ways of her youth with the passage of time. Robert's father (Roger Dumas) has been generous enough to give his son the comfortable home he shares with Marie-Jeanne and their children, but that doesn't mean there's always a genuine respect between them. Robert and Marie-Jeanne have three children -- their eldest Albert (Pio Marmai) is struggling with the rigors of medical school when we first meet him, while Raphael (Marc-Andre Grondin) is a teen trying to decide what to do with his life and Fleur (Deborah Francois) is still learning to be comfortable with her femininity. Between 1988 and 2000, the Duval family finds themselves dealing with the sort of life changes that affect most families, seeming both typical and revelatory at the same time.



Cast

Jacques Gamblin as Robert Duval

Zabou Breitman as Marie-Jeanne Duval

Déborah François as Fleur Duval

Marc-André Grondin as Raphaël Duval

Pio Marmaï as Albert Duval

Roger Dumas as Pierre

Cécile Cassel as Prune

Stanley Weber as Éric

Sarah Cohen-Hadria as Clara

Camille De Pazzis as Moïra

François-Xavier Demaison as Doctor Marcaurel



Awards and nominations

César Awards (France)

Won: Best Editing (Sophie Reine)

Won: Most Promising Actor (Marc-André Grondin)

Won: Most Promising Actress (Déborah François)

Nominated: Best Actor – Leading Role (Jacques Gamblin)

Nominated: Best Director (Rémi Bezançon)

Nominated: Best Film

Nominated: Best Music (Sinclair)

Nominated: Best Writing – Original (Rémi Bezançon)

Nominated: Most Promising Actor (Pio Marmaï)

Étoiles d'Or (France)

Won: Best Writer (Rémi Bezançon)



The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

A thoughtful exploration of the family unit

Sandra Hall

August 6, 2010

Time marches on. It also shows off the rest of its repertoire – hurting, healing, baffling and enlightening – in this sweet-natured French film about the highs and lows of family life.



We first meet Robert (Jacques Gamblin), a taxi driver, and his family in the 1970s in a montage of old snaps and home movies. In these happy moments plucked from holidays gone by and freeze-dried on film, his three children are bounding around like puppies. It's clear that a heady sense of promise is mingling with the tang of sea salt and the aroma of barbecue smoke.



We then skip a decade and home in on them again in 1988 as the eldest boy, Albert (Pio Marmai), a medical student, is preparing to leave home for a place of his own. He's not going far. His new studio apartment is in the block where his grandfather lives. Nonetheless, his mother, Marie-Jeanne (Zabou Breitman), sees it as the beginning of the end and to stave off the spectre of a boring and lonely old age, she's going to college. To study what? She's not sure. What matters is the decision itself.



It's well-trodden ground we're on here. But the film's writer-director, Remi Bezancon, negotiates the pitfalls in a deceptively artless style. It's all in the tone. Although the story's multiplicity of dramas are compressed into just five crucial days over a 12-year span, the melodrama is lightened by a keen sense of life's absurdities. Thanks to the potency of its residents' memories, the family house is a time machine where past and present uneasily co-habit, with nostalgia as both consolation and frustration.



Bezancon's screenplay is split into a series of vignettes told from different points of view. Every family member gets one day in the spotlight but these switches in perspective are done so seamlessly that each one amplifies and elaborates on the others.



The battle lines are drawn early. Robert has always been at loggerheads with his father (Roger Dumas), who thinks of him as a loser for settling for a job as a taxi driver. Robert and Albert aren't exactly close either, partly because the easygoing Robert is intimidated by his formidably capable son, who's on his way towards a lucrative career as a cosmetic surgeon.



Marie-Jeanne's main problem is with her daughter, Fleur (Deborah Francois). The blithe little girl in the opening montage has grown into a pouting teenager. She resents Marie-Jeanne keeping tabs on her but the full force of her fury is directed at her mother's reluctance to say goodbye to her youth.



Music is one of the film's most sustained, and sustaining, motifs. The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC and Blossom Dearie all figure as an index to these characters' tastes, desires and unspoken ideas about themselves. With Robert and his younger son, Raphael (Marc-Andre Grondin), it serves as a bonding agent. Both are rock fans who dearly wish they could play. Instead, they settle for an air-guitar playing contest. Raphael competes while his father urges him on after first coaching him in how to bring a Jimi Hendrix-like passion to his performance. It's an engaging metaphor for the dreaminess that underpins both their personalities. Raphael is the child who most resembles his father – something his grandfather has decided to do something about. Each Saturday, the old man has his grandson to lunch so he can give him lessons in wine appreciation. It's his way of teaching him about the importance of disciplined thinking.



Robert and Albert, on the other hand, have found little time for one another over the years. A rapprochement finally comes when Albert hails Robert's cab. He slips into the back seat without noticing who's driving and, in this unfamiliar context, father and son finally strike up the kind of conversation they should have had years earlier.



Bezancon's style is naturalistic but he's not afraid to introduce the odd trick. Stop motion is a favourite. Albert's old room is made over again and again in stop motion by successive occupants, which could look like an affectation but never does because it's such an apt means of expressing the way in which memory compresses time. In the act of re-arranging the room, Raphael and Fleur are continually reliving the past and reviewing the present.



With its easygoing tone, the film has some of the same qualities that have made television viewers so attached to the Australian series Packed to the Rafters but it has a lot more to say about the fluid relationship between age and maturity. We're all familiar with the way power shifts between the generations. But Bezancon's angle on generational interplay is more benign. What interests him is the way each generation goes on learning from the others, however old – or young – the teacher is.